Please Don't Shoot.

Eating popcorn in bed for dinner while watching The Times of Harvey Milk sometimes just seems like the best idea.

Earlier this week I played a show at El Rio with Chicken and Jen and Rae Spoon.  (I forgot to practice again.)  The last time I played a show at El Rio and forgot to practice, it was a benefit for the New Jersey 4.  This time around, those of us who found ourselves on the too-big dance floor of El Rio's back room were notable for where we were not - downtown Oakland, protesting the January 1st murder of Oscar Grant and the DA's and local authorities' mishandling of the case.  All of these events - the immediate arrests and subsequent convictions of 3 and a half to eleven years for each of the four young black lesbians from Jersey, and the close-range shooting of a young unarmed black man with his hands behind his back, as well as the two week delay in arresting his assailant Johannes Mehserle - are not unrelated.  They are both ultimately about power, and how it plays out in our justice system - rooted as it is in the post-slavery scramble to keep black youth outnumbered and outgunned.

On the one hand, seven women who knew of Sakia Gunn and understood the threat their young black and queer bodies posed, defended themselves.  They were not unarmed and pleading "Please don't shoot" with their hands behind their backs.  They were immediately arrested for the un-fatal stabbing of a violently homophobic misogynist, the original testimony of the "victim" was erased from the record, and the supposed weapon was never tested for DNA.  On the other hand, a man was on the ground and pleading when he was shot by a cop (protected by his fellow cops on the scene) in front of hundreds of Bay Area Rapid Transit users.  The killer was allowed to roam free - roam all the way to Nevada, in fact - despite the fact that several witnesses caught the shooting on video tape.  On the one hand, we can defend ourselves and get locked up; on the other, we can lay on the ground helpless and get shot.  We can get locked up or we can die.  It is an old and familiar tale. 

The first time folks out of the west coast really heard about Oscar Grant was not when Oscar Grant died.  It was when Oaklanders rose up in the streets a week later, burning trash cans and jumping on top of cop cars.  It was not until then that the national press found any reason to talk about the shooting death of a young black man, and even then it was only in passing, a side-note to the real point of the matter which was/is property destruction.  Maybe if New Orleans had burned over Adolph Grimes' murder, we'd be hearing about it over here.  (Although I think not, considering the national press' moratorium on non-hurricane related stories in New Orleans post-Katrina.)

At the conclusion of The Times of Harvey Milk, we are told that Harvey never wanted any violence over him, that he would have been unhappy with the riots that ensued after Dan White was convicted to just a few years with the "Twinkie defense."  And then there's Harry Britt, Milk's reluctant replacement on the SF Board of Supervisors, saying that "We were responding with anger.  We were angry."  Riots are what happen when angry people are not listened to.  

We are again at a moment, in 2009, of anger.  There is a movement against the options - to be locked up or to be laid down - that is being ignored, like a pot of soup on high heat.  No one seems too interested in history repeating itself.  I wonder what will happen this year.  

*special shout out goes to riotstorebellions for this one.

"They Just Shot Him."

I haven't posted anything about Oscar Grant. Please go to to M.Dot's blog to understand what is happening in Oakland, CA right now, and take a second to think about this country's reliance on unaccountable murderers - named "law enforcers" - at home and abroad.  Also know that this is the eighteen year anniversary of Rodney King, the ten year anniversary of Amadou Diallo, we're coming up on three years since Sean Bell - all people who high schoolers in Philadelphia and probably Oakland, too, have never heard of.  But when they find out - when English teachers show them a video on Youtube and they see that what happens across the country is the same thing that happens in their neighborhood - they can't help but be angry.

Here in the Bay, people are angry.  Like M.Dot says: "In some ways, rage is violence."

the next big thing.

Biking home late at night, I pass by the usual drunk hipsters that rove the Mission District beginning at about 9:30pm.  But tonight held a special surprise: two grown-ass drunk-as-hell ex-frat boys up in each others faces, arms raised and fists clenched with voices at fever pitch.  They were about to duke it out!  And then it occurred to me.  I'm through with girls not loving girls; I'm so over black on black crime.  It's time for the next big thing - white boys gettin' it on.  I wanna see those white boys beat the shit out of each other...!  It's about time, and someone's got to do it.  Who knows a white boy's soft spots better than his own brethren?  So, to those two guys in pea coats with slicked crew cuts on the corner of 20th and Valencia: thank you for setting a new standard.  I hope that you just may be on to something. 

from the archives.

[This piece was written in 2005 for the Baltimore Public Libraries.]

I have learned that everything is text, and all we are ever doing is reading to understand:

At the thrift store, sifting through the aisles, the novels of other people's lives discarded, a public library of souls.  In a new town, the unfamiliar streets and how high the buildings go.  They are stacked upon each other like the bindings that hold together secrets, and each of us an author.  Every picture and image that my mind records, every smell: the alleyway on my block, the sewer-ditch in Papine, the cold woods behind my parents' house.  All we are ever doing is reading, even when we can't read words.  I have certain essays memorized; some feel more like poetry.  The walls of my childhood bedroom, plastered with magazine pages, paint, nails, collages.  They are clean now, painted over pink by my parents after I moved out, but I know that story like the back of my hand because I lived inside of it.  Like the bodies of some lovers, especially certain parts -- specific moles and hairs and birthmarks, specific ways they breathe in their sleep.  My mother's left breast, post-mastectomy, because she used to let me watch her when she got dressed in the morning, and that was how I learned to read pain and disappointment.  The poetry of her face as it transformed every day with rouge and lipstick and mascara and creams.  I memorized that text a thousand times over and even tried to write it myself, but plagiarism never reads like the real thing.  My own autobiographical self: the stretch marks and scars telling stories I've taught myself to forget, the historical-fiction I write in tattoos.  Sometimes I let strangers sound me out -- because we are all only semi-literate the first time we are with somebody; because our skins are the great equalizers that put us all on the same page.  Our skins the great dividers that categorize us, a Dewey decimal system that organizes our bodies into castes.  We are all only semi-literate but have learned by heart th words we need to know.  All we ever do is read, and we do it in the languages that define our understanding of the world.  So sometimes the reading hurts -- it binds us to linguistic histories that we want only to escape.  But sometimes -- and this is when all of our life-reading becomes worth the struggle -- sometimes it releases us.  Because a library is a place for getting lost... libraries remind me of my surgery: the anesthesia takes me under, my body ceases to exist, and then the operators could have my heart, could disembowel me if they like.  And when we come to we've lost track of time, and the past seems vague, like a bedsheet, like something we are wrapped up in for security and not out of practical necessity.  All we are doing is reading, trying to grasp onto that security just before it slips into History.  Trying to let got of that security before it pulls us into the Past, before our books close and we forget how to sound out the words and these texts become dispensable and overlooked, sitting in a box that reads 'FREE' on the corner of the pavement, waiting to be eaten up by the rain and mice.